The late twentieth century and early twenty-first century have seen a sea change in political theorists’ understanding of “nature.” While much prior Western political thought invoked “nature” as a normative standard or ground for affirming or criticizing political arrangements, political theorists today seldom assume that nature can or should dictate politics. Influenced by poststructuralist, deconstructionist, feminist, and queer theory, political theorists, like their colleagues in related disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, have increasingly come to scrutinize dimensions of politics that long seemed fixed or determined by nature. They began to “denaturalize” everything from justice to law to gender...

In the famous letter to Vettori, dated December 10, 1513, where Machiavelli announces the completion of his “opusculo” about principalities, he describes it as a study of the “art of the state” (arte dello stato; CW, 929–930).¹ Since chapter 19 ofThe Princejuxtaposesarteandnatura, a careful reader may well conjecture that Machiavelli considers the art of the state—or politics—to be unnatural (76). The contrast between nature and politics is further mobilized in the opening chapters of the work, where Machiavelli opposes the “natural” prince to the “new” prince (6–7). The natural prince, Machiavelli...

In 1907, a brilliant twenty-six-year-old French sociologist and student of Emile Durkheim—Robert Hertz—published a hugely influential paper that made clear that there were two kinds of dead: one in nature, the other in culture.¹ (He himself died in the trenches of the Great War eight years later.) On the one hand, there are the dead as bodies: flesh, soon to putrefy, that has lost whatever made it alive and is now subject to decay like any other organic matter. These dead—corpses—have little history. Bystanders in an early thirteenth-century panel by Duccio held their noses in the...

What is wrong with this?¹ “In Durham, England, corpses will soon be used to generate electricity. A crematorium is installing turbines in its burners that will convert waste heat from the combustion of each corpse into as much as 150 kilowatt-hours of juice—enough to power 1,500 televisions for an hour.”² The idea “makes cremation much greener by utilizing its by-products,” explains the cremation engineer Steve Looker, referring to the pollutants that would no longer be emitted by crematoria were they to be captured for recycling as energy. He is not wrong. Yet there is surely something not quite green,...

There is a deep-seated anxiety that attends the blurring of this distinction between nature and artifice. For Jürgen Habermas, in hisThe Future of Human Nature, it is merely “unsettling.” Leon Kass argues that this ambiguity should “offend,” “repel,” and “repulse” us “because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear.”¹ InOur Posthuman Future, Francis Fukuyama suggests that the loss of this distinction between the natural and the humanmade “threatens” our humanity and pushes us toward “a ‘posthuman’ stage of history.”²

For each of these thinkers, biotechnology, in the form...

Human rights have become a predominant discourse in global politics, particularly in the post–Cold War era, in addressing various questions of injustice. If this transformation has been welcomed by various scholars who identify it with the promise of a postnational, transnational, or cosmopolitan future,¹ it has also become the target of several critics who underline its insidious effects as a new form of power. The cosmopolitan aura of human rights has been increasingly demystified as various scholars pointed out their deployment in the justification of neoimperial interventions,² their masking of a political power constituting subjects in need of political...

In the afterword to the second German edition ofThe Critique of Power, Axel Honneth notes how renewed interest in the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno is motivated in part by the conviction that Adorno’s later writings “provide the best means for comprehending the conditions for a noninstrumental relation to inner and outer nature.”¹ One of Adorno’s more suggestive articulations of this relation appears in his essay “On Subject and Object,” where he violates his self-imposed taboo on speculating about the possibility of reconciliation between humans and nonhuman entities: “In its proper place, even epistemologically, the relationship of subject...

Shortly after Earth Day, 1975, and inspired by Henry Thoreau’sWalden, E. F. Schumacher’sSmall Is Beautiful, Rachel Carson’sSilent Spring, Murray Bookchin’sPost-Scarcity Anarchism, and Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons,” I became an environmentalist.¹ I pursued that identity for thirty years or so. But now I’m considering becoming a materialist when I grow up. Not ahistoricalmaterialist, but a more animistic or at least less anthropocentric kind of materialist, one for whom “materiality” includes more than the social and economic structures of humans. In this materialism, matter is not the brute stuff for our vital projects or...